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Discord Safety: Safe Messaging!

Discord Direct Messages are a great way to instant message your buddies with the latest gossip or silliest memes since Imaqtpie decided to start playing League of Legends. With that in mind, we know that sometimes everyone in QTpie's server doesn't quite see eye to eye in terms of what's ok to talk about and what might make you a little uncomfortable.

To keep your DMs clean and prevent any unwarranted surprises at bay, Discord has a few extra levers you can pull. While we're still building out a few of these options, if you open your user settings tab and select the Privacy & Safety option, you'll see the "Safe Direct Messaging" option!

A few different levers:

The process is pretty simple. Safe Direct Messaging has three settings:

The differences are pretty simple:

Keep me safe: The safest option. This will have Discord scan any image sent in all DMs, regardless of whether you've added the user on your friend list, or the user is DMing you just by sharing a mutual server.

My friends are nice: The medium-est option! This will let Discord know to scan any images sent in DMs from users that aren't on your friends list, but also to trust your previously-added friends and not worry about any images they send.

I live on the edge: The self-confident option. Enabling this option will completely disable Discord's image scanning process, and leave you for a walk on the wild side for any and all DMs you receive. Careful, it's a jungle out there!

Machine-learning Robo-Hamsters

Before we get all excited about what exactly a machine-learning Robo-Hamster is doing, we wanted to take a moment and explain what's going on here. We here at Discord completely and totally understand that private messages are private, and that you'd want to keep them that way. With that in mind, we programmed the robo-hamsters to only scan images specifically (no text at all!), and include the option to be turned off completely. If you're a strong independent individual that don't need no image-scanning in your DMs, well, we got you too.

And that's all, really. We've got a few more gizmos and gadgets in the works to make sure that baddies out in the wild realms of the internet are kept at bay, so stay tuned for more!